Connections

I'm attending a family wedding today -- it's a young woman I don't think I've ever met, but her grandmother and my father are cousins of a sort, and the dress the bride will be wearing was one made by my great-grandmother. I've never seen it, and can't explain why it thrills me so much to think about getting a gander at it today.

Except for this: The older I get the more I feel a need to stay connected to my family's history. Maybe it has to do with a creeping awareness that my parents won't be here forever, which means I won't be either -- and the thought that something we create today (whether tangible or not) will be around for future generations to touch or experience makes me happy.

My mother is in the process of cleaning out closets in her house, and she's been "unloading" insignificant family treasures on whomever happens to walk in her back door. A recent visit of mine yielded a spool of thread that HER grandmother had used.

What tickled me so about this is that my mother's grandmother has always been described to me as a no-nonsense, humorless woman. She was warm enough to her grandchildren so I've heard, but it was the kind of warmth that seemed manufactured from a sense of politeness rather than a sense of joy.

One could hardly blame her, though. She came from a prosperous family and was quite well educated. It was her "misfortune" to fall hopelessly in love with a gentle man of little means who devoted himself to the Gospel of Christ as a minister in the Presbyterian Church. In those days, this meant great sacrifice both of individual freedom and any hope of financial prosperity.

She (Adah) and her husband (Russell) raised six daughters: Mary, Martha, Ruth, Rachael, Sarah, and Lena. Those daughters were a handful -- most especially my grandmother, Sarah, who never met a convention she didn't enjoy breaking. She told me often that her love of clothes and shoes and accessories was born from the days when she and her sisters were forced to dress from a barrel of "missionary clothes" -- cast off garments that members of my grandfather's congregations had outgrown, or had gone ratty, which had been donated for the children of missionaries. (Inset picture is of my G'grandfather Rev. J. Russell Crawford, his wife Adah Baird Crawford, and their six daughters. My grandmother, Sarah, is sitting atop the table. She was in a snit that day -- she didn't get a bow in her hair.)

But I digress. G'Grandmother Adah was a large, tall woman with a countenance of steel. G'Grandfather Russell provided the tenderness -- she ruled the house with an iron fist. Oh, she wasn't a cruel woman -- but anything frivilous was wasteful, and she saw as her bounden duty an obligation to raise children who were frugal, prudent, and respectful, as befitted the children of poor preachers.

So this spool of thread took me by surprise -- it is of very bright color, and so unlike anything I expected Adah would have needed that I felt a twinge of sadness for her. She should have had a life of beautiful things: sparkling conversation, parties, a house staff to attend to her needs, pretty dresses. What she had was far different.

And I can't help but wonder, as I roll this spool of bright thread in my hand, is what it was for.

I like to think that there was a part of her that held in a corner of her heart a hankering for something frivilous. Maybe, I like to think, she hemmed a dress with this thread, or used it to mend her undergarments just to remind herself that there was a saucy, smart, happy young girl inside the woman who ran her household with such economy of every sort.

Maybe this is why I hold onto some silly things myself -- I want a great-grandchild someday to hold something of mine in their hands and wonder, with love and a wish they'd known me, who I really was.